3 things you should consider before migrating to Drupal 8 - Part 1

Drupal is among the most popular CMS’ and has been offering the community with several version updates. With Drupal 6 no longer being supported, by the Drupal Community, a huge amount of sites need to be migrated to Drupal 7 or 8, and quickly!

Given the significant changes in Drupal 8 structure, migrating from Drupal 6 or Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 is particularly challenging. But with all the hustle in the market, organizations often miss out on the basic aspects before updating their sites.

This month we’re focusing on things to lookout for before updating your website to Drupal 8

Companies constantly strive to be distinct with amazing designs and an exceptional user experience; however, they often miss out on the crucial piece, i.e. are they ready for the upgrade. There are a couple of scenarios when one could decide to upgrade:

Is your site on Drupal 6?

Currently used contributed modules, are they migrated for Drupal 8?

Do you need more out of core?

Building a new website

Current website is in Drupal 6 and is facing many issues

Current website in Drupal 7 and want to upgrade to Drupal8 to implement new and enhanced features.

However, before one decides to start an upgrade, it is important to consider module availability, time constraints, budget for upgrading, features of your site, content structure, and similar more. Even though all site upgrades are unique, there are a few questions you must ask before upgrading the site to Drupal 8:

HAVE A DRUPAL 6 WEBSITE?

If the answer is yes, you don’t have the luxury of waiting for contributed modules to be ready for use. The only way out is to migrate your site to either Drupal7 or Drupal8 to protect the integrity of your site (it would be vulnerable to any new security issues). Approximately, about one in ten Drupal sites are still running on Drupal 6, and it is an easy target for a site breach.

Thus moving your site from Drupal 6 to a secure version of Drupal is very critical. While this eBook provides details on the ways to check if your website is ready for migration, the process itself is complex. Along with migrating/upgrading modules, you need to migrate, content, data and any other custom development.

Migrate is now a part of the core!

Three modules were added in order to facilitate the custom migrations as well as the Drupal 6 or Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 migrations:

• Migrate

• Migrate Drupal

• Migrate Drupal UI

This module allows you to define and build custom migration plugins. It facilitates the migrating Drupal 6 or Drupal 7 source data to Drupal 8, and the Migrate Drupal UI module provides a user interface for a guided migration from Drupal 6 or 7 to Drupal 8. Assisted upgrades to Drupal 8 can now be done, much more easily than they used to be able to earlier.

That concludes our Drupal 8 migration piece for this week. In part two, we’ll be covering the other factors to consider before migrating to Drupal 8.